Asterisk trunk recently got a pretty cool new feature. You can now use Asterisk as a highly configurable video soft phone. The commit to trunk is here.
The way it works is pretty neat. Asterisk already had a couple of console channel drivers: chan_oss and chan_alsa. These channel drivers allow you to use a local OSS or ALSA sound device as an endpoint for a call. These interfaces are commonly used to interface with overhead paging systems. They are also commonly used by people to use Asterisk as an extremely powerful soft phone.
Now, Asterisk as a softphone just got a lot cooler.
The OSS console channel driver, chan_oss, now has video support. This means that you can make video calls from the Asterisk CLI. For the video source, you currently have a couple of options. The first is to use a webcam. The second, which I find quite interesting, is you can use an X11 screen grabber. That means you can have a section of your local display that gets captured and sent along as the video stream.
There is also a “skinnable” dialpad for use as a graphical softphone interface for dialing.
The code uses libavcodec from ffmpeg for video transcoding. As the commit message states, it currently supports h261, h263, h263+, h264, and mpeg4.
Many thanks to Luigi Rizzo, Sergio Fadda, and Marta Carbone for the great new feature!
5 responses so far ↓
1 myAsterisk.co.nz » Video Calling Over Asterisk // Dec 19, 2007 at 5:41 am
[...] am by Tony Hughes in Uncategorized From Russell Bryants blog: Asterisk trunk recently got a pretty cool new feature. You can now use Asterisk has a _highly_ [...]
2 Nenabu // Mar 21, 2008 at 2:35 pm
omg.. good work, guy
3 More Work on Asterisk as a Softphone … Inside Firefox?! // May 19, 2008 at 9:32 am
[...] and his students are working on. Previously, I pointed out how they had done work to allow you to use Asterisk as a softphone that supports video. Now, it sounds like they are taking this even [...]
4 SIPFree - Las Comunicaciones del futuro » Blog Archive » Asterisk : Nuevas posibilidades de integracion de Sofphones directamente de Firefox // May 19, 2008 at 2:29 pm
[...] WordPress.org Mayo 19th - Asterisk : Nuevas posibilidades de integracion de Sofphones directamente de Firefox 0meneos menéalo A través de twitter me entero de un interesante campo, el desarrollo de softphones embebidos dentro de firefox que nos permitiran nuevas posibildades de integracion con Asterisk. En el mismo post en el que Luigi Rizzo describe que fácil y potente es esa tecnologia, vemos tambien sus avances en la integración de video y asterisk… [...]
5 Múltiples fuentes de video para chan_oss at Mi Brain-Training Personal // Jun 29, 2008 at 5:51 pm
[...] Rizzo participó en la inclusión del video a chan_oss, como coemntó Russel Bryant por aquí: http://www.russellbryant.net/blog/index.php/2007/12/18/asterisk-as-a-video-soft-phone/ pues bien, ahora se soportan múltiples [...]
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